


Conglomerate

by LaFlashdrive



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Implied Incest, Mentions of alcohol, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaFlashdrive/pseuds/LaFlashdrive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the gang sits down, gets drunk on Laura's dorm room floor, and talks about sex, love, and their personal identities - or maybe the fact that all of them are still so young and none of them have figured out everything about themselves yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conglomerate

**Author's Note:**

> _con·glom·er·ate_   
>  _noun_   
>  _kənˈɡlämərət/_   
>  _a number of different things or parts that are put or grouped together to form a whole but remain distinct entities._

The five of you have never really had that conversation about what all your sexualities are, but you never really felt like you needed to because you all just sort of got it. You’re pretty sure that all of you just assumed that none of you were straight, and that that was probably the most accurate description of the five of you as a whole anyway. It was the only thing that was no doubt true in all of your cases despite your various gender and sexual identities. Not to mention the fact that you’re also pretty sure none of you are ready to claim with 100% certainty what your sexuality is. You’re all so young (even Carmilla) and everything about your lives and Silas and your relationships are constantly changing.

You think you might be, though - ready to claim your sexuality that is. You’re pretty sure it’s safe to assume at this point that you’re a lesbian. The last thing you ever had that was even remotely close to a crush on a boy was in kindergarten when some kid whose name you think was Tommy shared his carrots with you at lunch because he didn’t like carrots and your dad always told you they’d make your eyes stronger and super sight sounded like a cool power to have to you. You liked Tommy for that, but you also liked him because he was pretty. He had the most gorgeous long brown hair, and, admittedly, you thought he was a girl the first time you met him and that was probably why you allowed yourself to develop any kind of a crush on him in the first place. But when you’d called him “she” the first (and last) time he went off on you and immediately corrected your pronouns and you’ve learned your lesson since then about assuming anyone’s gender identity based on their appearance. You think you’re a lesbian, but you guess if maybe another non-female raven-haired rapunzel would walk into your life it’s possible you could maybe be attracted to them so there’s always that chance that you might not be totally gay, so it’s probably best not to label yourself.

You’ve kinda assumed Carmilla is a lesbian too because she only seems to sleep with (a lot of) women, but then you think maybe that’s only because her mother only wanted to kidnap girls and you have to admit to yourself that most of the girls (however numerous) Carmilla slept with are girls she was primping for the sacrifice. She’s also, like, 300 years old, though, and three centuries is a lot of time for someone to think about and change their sexuality, so maybe she wasn’t always solely into girls, especially in the sixteen hundreds when you imagine homosexuality was a lot less acceptable and people were scared into leading more heteronormative life styles whether they wanted to or not.

You thought Danny was gay, but then that thing with Kirsch happened (even though she’s still denying that it happened most of the time) so you don’t really know about her and you don’t really care enough to pry and make her uncomfortable.

You figure you don’t need to label Perry because you’ve never seen her even remotely attracted to anyone but LaFontaine and you’re pretty sure they’re the only person that will ever matter to her romantically. Everyone else thinks so, too. Crowley Hall has taken up bets on when LaFontaine is going to propose to her and a couple of the girls on the floor have insisted that they’re probably already legally married and just modest about their relationship. 

You’d like to agree, but you guess LaFontaine is dating JP now and that makes them either less gay or more gay than you previously thought, and you just don’t even try to label them at all now because you know for certain that they have no clue what to even label themselves - in gender or sexuality.

They pretty much say that flat out when Danny asks them about it. All of you are a little bit tipsy in your dorm room, but there’s not enough alcohol for all of you to get drunk and Carmilla won’t share her wine because “none of you will appreciate it” because it’s “crafted for a refined palette” or some excuse you weren’t listening to because you were rolling your eyes and because you are probably the drunkest of the five of you just because you don’t drink and it doesn’t take much to get you drunk.

You’re all having a sleepover because you can. You’d call it a girls’ night except LaFontaine is not a girl, but they’re not a boy either, so you guess they’re allowed to be here and you don’t even care that their gender isn’t your own. In a way you finally get to have that coed birthday party your dad never let you have at your house because he didn’t trust anyone that wasn’t a girl around you and he didn’t really trust the girls either after you came out. You don’t think you’ve ever really had a legitimate sleepover, not like this, and this is exactly what you imagine a good sleepover to be, full of gossip and talking and friendship and heavy, burning tongues. 

"So," Danny starts, grinning like a fool even though she’s definitely the least tipsy because she’s huge and there’s not enough wine coolers in the world to taint her veins with any kind of blood alcohol level high enough to be considered drunk. "You’re dating JP," she says to LaFontaine, wiggling her eyebrows exaggeratedly even though Perry’s have noticeably fallen and sunk into her brow.

"Yep," LaFontaine says simply. They keep their answer brief just because there isn’t much to say, because even with that one short syllable they have announced that they are proud of their relationship, that they refuse to show shame in their choice of partner - whether the shame most everyone thinks they’re supposed to feel comes from the fact that JP is male or the fact that he is digital.

"But he’s, like, a boy," Danny slurs, then laughs like it’s the funniest thing in the world, like you’re all five and boys still have cooties. You probably wouldn’t admit it out loud, but sometimes you still think they do.

"I can’t like boys?" LaFontaine asks, handing their wine cooler to Perry through the hands in her lap. They’re sharing drinks because Perry did not want to get drunk and you did. They are absorbing less alcohol to leave more for you and Danny. LaFontaine’s hand lingers on Perry’s thigh for a moment far too long to be brief and you wonder if the two of them are still sleeping together, if LaFontaine is cheating on JP or if maybe JP knows about it and they’re all polyamorous. You might ask later, if it comes up, but you won’t invade their privacy here in front of Danny and Carmilla and Perry when their tongue is loose and the alcohol is more likely to pry information out of them that they soberly would not surrender.

Danny shrugs because she’s a feminist and of course she adamantly advocates that everyone should like whoever they want, but she’s reserved about it because you know she’s been questioning her own sexuality lately, because all this time she didn’t like boys but then she did and now she’s vocalizing the same questions to LaFontaine that she’s been internally asking herself for the past couple of months. She’s projecting, and you think it’s probably good for her to get the topic out in the open like that, to know that it’s something you can all talk about.

You aren’t going to tell her that she’s kind of being a hypocrite, though, accusing LaFontaine of something “dirty” like liking a boy, because it is a soft sport for her and an invasion of her privacy and you don’t want to embarrass her or tear open fresh wounds. Carmilla does, however - want to embarrass her, that is - and she doesn’t hesitate to. Her words are crisp because she is not drunk because vampires do not get drunk easily and she is sipping her wine sparingly, savoring the taste.

"You like boys, too, Pup," she prods. "You enjoy beefcake as much as I enjoy cupcake." Her eyes graze over you in a way you can easily imagine her fingers imitating. You blush scarlet and hope that everyone thinks it’s because of the alcohol. You take another sip.

"I don’t like boys,” Danny protests, twiddling her thumbs around the sweaty neck of the bottle in her hands. “I like a boy.”

"Same thing," Carmilla accuses, but you know she’s wrong because it probably actually isn’t. It’s very possible that Kirsch is just the exception to Danny’s sexuality because literally nothing in this world is 100% (except for the way Carmilla looks at you in the early morning hours when you wake up and when she’s about to go to bed and you can tell that she loves you fully, completely).

"Nothing wrong with that," LaFontaine comforts, shrugging again and rubbing shoulders with Perry who is still uncomfortably silent. You can tell Carmilla is being kind of an asshole and Danny doesn’t deserve it, not this time anyway, and LaFontaine knows it too when they come to her rescue. Carmilla rolls her eyes all the way across the room, but somehow her dark irises land on you in the end of the arc.

"Yeah, Danny," you tack on, latching your hand onto Danny’s shoulder because you think it makes it easier for her foggy mind to understand your slurred words if they are spoken mere inches away from her ear when you are leaned so close into her. "There’s nothing wrong with liking a boy. Just because somebody" - you shoot a pointed look to Carmilla - "thinks it makes them better than you because they’re a gold star lesbian doesn’t mean that it actually does."

LaFontaine nods and Carmilla lets out a low scoff, after which you brace yourself for the remark that’s sure to follow about how “yes it does” or how “actually I’m probably more of a platinum star lesbian after 300 years” but Carmilla doesn’t say anything you expect her to. She takes a sip of her wine, then shakes her head and looks deeply into the bottle like she did with the champagne glass that first night she hit on you. “I am definitely not a gold star lesbian.”

She whispers so low that you aren’t sure if you’re just imagining it because finally she’s not spitting out some snarky comeback for once, but then LaFontaine presses further and you realize that they heard her too. “What do you mean?”

"I slept with Will a few times."

Your brain stops and so do your lungs, and you’re pretty sure no one else is breathing either because there’s just no noise in the room, white or not, as you all wait for Carmilla to explain further, even though you’re not immediately sure that she will. She does speak again, though, thankfully, and even more thankfully her words aren’t as traumatizing as you thought they might be, as you thought the experience might have been for her.

"It wasn’t a big deal," Carmilla assures you. "It was the fifties. He wanted to and Mother didn’t exactly trust me around girls anymore. Believe it or not, he was kind of cute and innocent as a baby vamp - before he started thinking supernatural abilities made him some kind of demi-god and he started acting like an asshole who thought he was better than everyone just because he could evaporate and break all the world records for holding his breath underwater."

You breath a sigh of relief that’s followed by a breath that isn’t so relieved because Carmilla slept with her brother, but it wasn’t as fucked up as it sounded and they weren’t really blood related and they’d both consented to it, it sounded like, so you guess it isn’t so bad. The rest of the group takes a moment to let it sink in, too, but no one seems to judge and you all just kind of accept it the way you all just kind of accept each other. You think Carmilla might be a little bit grateful for it, but you doubt she’ll admit that out loud.

Perry seems the most upset about it, but she’s seemed kind of upset the whole night. She doesn’t say anything. She shrugs it off easily enough. Pseudo incest isn’t the weirdest thing to happen at Silas U, and Perry is more concerned with the current supernaturally charming cafeteria ladies and the recent events involving the merpeople swim team and the shark to have enough energy to dwell upon something that happened sixty years ago and definitely still wasn’t happening to this day, both because Will was dead and because Carmilla was only sleeping with you now.

"I guess the gold star goes to Laura or Perry, then," Danny says begrudgingly, and you laugh inappropriately because you are drunk kind of and it sounds like the title is being bought and handed out like your lives are a game of Mario Party and Danny and LaFontaine and Carmilla don’t have enough coins to purchase the prized gold star in question. You and Perry appear to be an equal number of spaces away from the goal and you’re going to bring up Tommy and how maybe you don’t deserve it when Perry says the first thing she’s said all night and cuts you off.

"I’ve never actually slept with a girl before."

It hits you finally, with the way her shoulders slump and she so so softly speaks to the bottle in her lap and to LaFontaine’s hand on her thigh, that she’s been quiet because she feels out of place, because maybe she doesn’t think she fits in with the rest of you because she isn’t queer in the same way that you all are (even though none of you have the exact same identities. You aren’t sure two people can ever share the exact same identity). 

You are confused for a second because you know Perry is not a virgin, but then you see LaFontaine look at her like she has found the solution for world peace, and you get it. LaFontaine is the only person she’s slept with the way Carmilla is the only person you’ve slept with, and even though they’ve surely made love before LaFontaine stopped identifying as a girl, Perry has finally, finally applied the notion that LaFontaine is genderqueer not only to her present, but to her past as well, and even though Perry thought she was having sex with a girl when she and LaFontaine were still together, she realizes now that she was mistaken and that she has not in fact ever done it with anyone who identified as female. Perry has never been in a lesbian relationship, and she feels out of place because the rest of you have, even LaFontaine who is not a girl but who is not shy about mentioning other girls they have slept with, other girls who did identify as lesbian at the same time they did too. They still call it lesbian sex, if only because it’s easiest to call it that, but now Perry isn’t calling it that even though the same convenient title could be applied to them, and LaFontaine looks more thankful than you’ve ever seen anyone look in your entire life. Your heart swells for them.

Their hand squeezes Perry’s thigh so hard you think they might be in pain. In the good kind of way. (The way your heart hurts every time Carmilla kisses you and tells you she loves you in some language you pretend not to understand.)

LaFontaine is happy and so are you and so is Carmilla, you can tell, and so is Danny in that drunken, giddy way of hers, and you want Perry to be happy too because this is your first real slumber party and you want everybody to be happy.

"I didn’t have sex with a girl ‘til a couple weeks ago," you offer with a shrug, to which LaFontaine smirks and Carmilla smirks harder. Perry meets your eye and seems to appreciate your attempts to make her feel better. "There’s nothing wrong with having not slept with a girl."

"Yeah, at least you didn’t sleep with your brother," Danny confers, and LaFontaine elbows her in the side because Carmilla is right there, and when you look at your girlfriend she looks like she might be thinking about swooping down on you all from her place on her bed as some kind of barrage of bats and ambushing Danny in the face.

It also strikes you that she looks offended, not guilty. She doesn’t regret sleeping with Will, you don’t think, she just doesn’t approve of the person he became. For the first time you consider that she might be as bisexual as Danny says she isn’t, but you know for a fact that she’s only ever been in love with you and Ell, so maybe she’s homoromantic. Either way it doesn’t matter, and you don’t love her any less for who else has been inside of her before you.

"I’m not judging!" Danny defends. "Hell, I’m sleeping with a boy who slept with his best friend who apparently slept with his sister, so I’m right in there on the weird chain. No judging here."

It’s the first time Danny’s admitted to sleeping with Kirsch, and you aren’t surprised, but you also haven’t seen them do anything but flirt bashfully with each other and blush a whole lot while avoiding each other’s eye contact. It’s hard for you to picture them going to town on each other between the sheets because they both seem so sheepish around each other, but you can’t really imagine either of them are particularly gentle in bed (mostly because you’d fooled around with Danny a couple of times. She’d only gotten as far as second base, and she had always made absolutely sure that you were into everything that was happening, but she had never been particularly slow or patient, and consequently that was the sexual impression you were left with of her). Danny’s personality was hungry, as was her desire, and you saw so much of Kirsch in her that you had to picture him the same way.

You think about how kinky their sex must secretly be, and you laugh because you know your head wouldn’t have gone there if you were sober and if Carmilla wasn’t giving you seduction eyes every other time you looked at her and making chills run up your spine that very thoroughly contradicted the heat it burned through the seam of your dreams.

Eventually you move past the Danny/Kirsch link and look across the rest of the chain. Danny had slept with Kirsch and Kirsch had slept with Will and Will had slept with Carmilla and Carmilla had slept with you, and somehow you weren’t all that removed from having sex with your ex girlfriend who you had never actually managed to have sex with. The idea was strange and exciting to you all at once, fascinated you with how you were now connected to all your friends in so many different ways when you hadn’t known any of these people six months ago. It made you sad Perry and LaFontaine weren’t on the chain with you, at least not in any way you knew of. It was possible, though. LaF could’ve slept with one of the same Summer Society girls Danny had, and Perry could be connected to you all through that. You kind of hoped that was the case. It made you feel closer to them all in your intoxicated haze.

Carmilla looked at Danny like she was thinking the same thing you were, like she realized she was connected sexually to the infamous Danny Lawrence, but she didn’t seem as thrilled about the idea as you did. You smile anyway because of course she’d be pissy about it. You wouldn’t expect any less from her even though she’d probably been connected to Danny long before Kirsch ever entered the picture. Carmilla had slept with so many girls on campus, you’d be surprised if there was anyone at Silas that she (and you, by default) wasn’t connected to.

You like that, in a way. You like it a lot. As much as you don’t like Silas, it is so important to you, will forever be important to you. It is where you found your love and your friends and your bravery and your courage, and you have only been here for a couple months, but you have already made memories that will last you a lifetime (and more if you someday adopt Carmilla’s version of a lifetime), and you know that you are nowhere near done with this place and that this place is nowhere near done with you. You will be here for three and a half more years, and you will love every second of it.

You will love it the way LaFontaine lights up when someone uses their right pronouns. You will love it the way Danny has hearts in her eyes when Kirsch brings her cookies after class and calls them biscuits to try to sound smarter than he is. You will love it the way Perry revels in the smell of bleach at five in the morning when LaFontaine is snoring rather unpeacefully in the bed beside hers.

You will love it the way Carmilla loves you, deep and endless, passionate and every night.

"I guess you’re right," Perry smiles to Danny, to all of you, because all of you are smiling back at her. "I guess it isn’t so bad."


End file.
